On June 12, 1878, in the woods along Salt Creek in Wise County, Captain June Peak met Henry Underwood, who had reached the gang's horses and was riding back. "A pistol duel at once opened," says the 1878 book "Life and Adventures of Sam Bass," "but Captain Peak shouted to his men and Underwood put spurs to his horse and fled." That fight, and the Ranger company he raised to hunt Sam Bass, are his part in Sam Bass and the Spanish Gold: A Map of the Holes.
Warsaw
Junius W. Peak was born on April 5, 1845, at Warsaw, Kentucky, a son of Jefferson Peak and Martha Malvina Reasor Peak, who moved to Dallas in 1855. At 16 he joined the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles; he rode with Morgan's Raiders into Indiana and Ohio and was wounded twice at Chickamauga. In Dallas he was a deputy sheriff from 1865, city marshal for 4 years from 1874, and in 1878 city recorder.
Company B
After the Eagle Ford train robbery, before he held any commission, he and 3 other "private detectives from Dallas" followed a trail north into the woods near Denton, came on 2 men asleep, and lost them after an exchange of shots.
Early in April 1878 Governor Richard Hubbard commissioned him a second lieutenant in Company B of the Frontier Battalion, "for the purpose of destroying the Sam Bass gang of train robbers," as Peak put it. The 1878 book has "thirty picked men" sworn in on May 18 under "Lieutenant June Peak, formerly Recorder of Dallas," but an Austin paper had "Peak's rangers" in the field by April 30, and on May 1 he surprised Bass at breakfast about 4 miles southeast of Denton.
The square at Denton
Ed F. Bates, writing in 1918, has "Captain June Peake with seventy-five State Rangers" learn from Sheriff W. F. Egan that the gang was 4 miles south of Denton. "But the captain paraded his men around the public square at Denton and departed without the gang." The 1878 book and James B. Gillett put the company at 30, and Gillett the whole pursuit at probably 100, so Bates's 75 is best read as Rangers and posses together, or as memory inflating the number.
Gillett wrote that Bass played with the raw company "as a child plays with toys." That is legend, hedged by Gillett himself with "it is said"; the 1878 book has the gang running hard and losing horses. Gillett blamed John B. Jones for raising new men instead of sending veterans, and called Peak "a very able officer."
Murphy
Peak helped turn Jim Murphy. Deputy Marshal Johnson, Murphy said, "came back with June Peak, and we talked the matter over. June says, 'I will go and see Major Jones.'" Murphy "worked this plan under three men, Jones, Peak and Johnson." From May 21 Jones meant to hold Peak's company at Dallas "so that Murphy would know where they were." Not knowing why, the public criticized "his inaction," and the 1878 book's closing notes include "A Word of Justification for Captain Peak." That pressure sent him into Wise County.
Salt Creek
The Rangers followed the gang on June 12 "into the tangle wood along Salt creek, near Cottondale." Sergeant Floyd of the Stonewall Greys of Dallas, Thomas Floyd on the company roster printed in 1927, shot Arkansas Johnson dead at Bass's side. Unsure where the rest were, Peak had his men fire on the gang's horses, killing 2 and taking the rest. Underwood, Henry Collins and Carter vanished. The 1878 book called it "the only fight in the long pursuit which was attended by a good result." Peak, in 1927: "By July of that year I had succeeded in disposing of the entire band, excepting Bass, Barnes and Jackson." Seaborn Barnes and Frank Jackson rode south with Bass to Round Rock, where Bass died on July 21.
The frontier
Company B went west, working around San Angelo "against Indians and mapping waterholes," and in 1879 a detachment lost Ranger W. B. Anglin in what Peak called the last 2 engagements with Comanches and Kiowas on the Texas frontier. In 1880 Peak resigned to go home "upon the prayer of his father." His men resolved that he had always been "prompted by a stern sense of duty, ever ready, ever willing."
After
He built supply stations in Mexico for the Mexican Central Railroad, married Henrietta Boll of Dallas on November 28, 1881, and ranched in Shackelford County from 1884 to 1899. From 1899 he was in real estate in Dallas, where he and his father had begun selling the family land as Peak's Suburban Addition in 1879, and from 1919 to 1924 he was superintendent of White Rock Lake. In September 1927 Frontier Times put him on its cover, with an article built on a letter he dictated. He had asked for 20 copies.
He died at his home in Dallas on April 20, 1934, aged 89, and is buried in Grove Hill Memorial Park; plot and stone are unverified. East Dallas streets are named for Jefferson Peak's children: Junius, Worth, Victor, Carroll, Flora and Juliette Fowler. The Ranger his company lost has a 1967 state marker in Fairview Cemetery at Midland, which calls W. B. Anglin the "last man to be killed by Indians in central west Texas."
Sources: Handbook of Texas, Junius W. Peak (Joan J. Perez) and Sam Bass (Wayne Gard); "Captain June Peak, Texas Ranger," Frontier Times (Bandera), September 1927, including the 1880 resolutions of the Colorado and Concho Stock Association and of Company B; Talya Tate Boerner, "A letter from Junius Peak" (2013), transcribing Peak's dictated letter of August 6, 1927; Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Texas Treasures, law enforcement; Anonymous, "Life and Adventures of Sam Bass" (Dallas: Dallas Commercial Steam Print, 1878), including the statement of Jim Murphy; James B. Gillett, "Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881" (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1921); Ed. F. Bates, "History and Reminiscences of Denton County" (Denton: McNitzky Printing Company, 1918); Weekly Democratic Statesman (Austin), May 2, 1878; John H. Slate, "Larger-than-life character Junius Peak was a forefather of East Dallas," Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate, October 21, 2016; Wikipedia, "Peak's Suburban Addition, Dallas," citing the City of Dallas landmark ordinance of 1995; Texas Historical Commission, marker 5664, W. B. Anglin.
